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The Tenor And Tenure Of Ango Abdullahi -By Okey Ikechukwu

The tenor of Prof. Abdullahi’s contributions to national discourse in the last 10 years has been anything but edifying. It is, in fairness to him, sometimes an understandable reaction to other tendentious developments in the polity.

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Ango Abdullahi

Professor Ango Abdullahi was recently reported to have assured Nigerians, and the world at large, that the Fulani in Nigeria and West Africa can take on all comers, overrun any place and emerge victorious in any battle. But he did not say how the Fulani would develop holistically as a people and become part of a forward-looking, 21st century world that is leaving behind certain modes of living? He also did not say anything about the dangers faced by an elite that seems focused on breeding a younger, “replacement” generation that is not being tooled to follow in the footsteps of the likes of an Ango Abdullahi in education, or that of a Chanchangi, Dantatta and Dangote in entrepreneurship, business and industry. He is conjuring, instead, images of knife and gun wielding, scraggy-looking, persons; perhaps even triumphantly displaying decapitated heads, burnt out villages and farmlands as background to their group photographs. This not what a professor, learned or not, should wish to bring up in a fractious society with strong disruptive tensions.

A man like Ango Abdullahi should, at this point in his life, be speaking with greater discretion and less like the average activist that could pop out of any street corner. An elder, and even a grand elder and former Vice Chancellor of one of the few universities set up in this country deliberately to develop the badly needed human capital for a section of the country, should be focused on development. An elder and professor from a section of the country with an average poverty index of over 73% of the population, with most of them being progressively wiped out by marauders on a daily basis, should be worried about the fact that his part of the country houses some of the poorest people on earth today. The poverty is not genetic, or an indication of some kind of inferiority. It is the result of misrule, as a simple look at the statistics on literacy and other indices of development show appalling details.

Prof. Ango Abdullahi should not just speak of “his” people, but should speak of how the current capacities of the people in question would guarantee their long term survival in a world of galloping technology and climate change. It should occur to him that he is denigrating his own people when he presents them as largely a marauding, warring band of survivalists, who are ever ready to mete out inhuman killings at the slightest provocation. It should also occur to him that he is adding to the growing negative profiling of the Fulani person today. This new profile is progressively overshadowing the fact that we have lived peacefully with the Fulani for decades here. Without prejudice to the experience of the Hausa kings and Afonja of the Yorubas in the hands of their Fulani guests, there is a certain quiet dignity to the average Fulani person, whether he rears cattle or is a town Fulani. There is a reticence that bespeaks both breeding and cool calculation.

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There is also an unhurried temper that is said to account for his capacity for long term plots and vengeance. But all peoples have their negative and positive traits. Development in modern society involves adjustment to others, the cultivation of the positive and de-escalation of the negative. People are who they are and hardly is anyone there just in order to be liked. Therefore whining and rolling on the ground in order to attract pity won’t cut it. Design a mutually beneficial survival template, or perish.
Before it was: “He that is down needs fear no fall.” Today it is: “He that is down should watch out, as he is likely to be further trampled upon.” So, let’s get real, beginning with the presumed invulnerability of Prof. Ango Abdullahi’s impregnable fighting forces.

The strength of the criminals all over the country today, some of them Fulani from outside Nigeria, actually comes from the fact that they are unchallenged for now. When the government of Ghana took concrete and firm steps to contain their excesses it became obvious that they had no capacity to do anything. But that is because the Ghanaian State took its own survival seriously. The Fulanis, and Myetti Allah, did nothing when Sule Lamido, as governor of Jigawa State, forbade open wandering of cattle in his state. They also did nothing when Lamido authorized every citizen of Jigawa State to kill and barbecue any cattle found roaming in the city. No one heard their whimper about this “Lamido’s free gift to the people of Jigawa State,” as it was then called. And Lamido is Fulani, and of the right breed if you like, like the professor.

So how come that Prof. Ango Abdullahi, who should be thinking of Sir Ahmadu Bello’s dream of a developed Northern Nigeria that was at par with the rest of the country in education and other paradigms is mistaking the contrived impotence of the Nigerian State for the invulnerability of his Fulani kinsmen? How come he is taking the reluctance of the government to deal with a matter that can be clearly seen for what it is, for a superior survival template for a people that are in danger of being left behind by the march of history? If Ango Abdullahi, who should otherwise be a discerning elder in tradition, learning and leadership, actually believes that his thesis has the strength of a feather, let him contemplate the following questions:

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(1) How many bullets do you have in a fully loaded AK47 magazine? (2) How many people will a man holding a loaded AK47 kill, assuming every bullet hits the mark? (3) How many such magazines, loaded or not, does the average gun-wielding herdsman have on him at any time, as he walks farmlands and ruins their crops? (4) Can any of the presumably impregnable Fulani herder with a gun engage in a full-blown, 10 minutes, non-stop shooting war without needing reinforcement? (5) Will such reinforcement come quickly enough to guarantee his survival? (6) Can he have two days of sustained engagement, even with the reinforcements coming via bags of garri, etc. stuffed with bullets and guns? (7) Will he not soon run out of bullets, men and other resources if he takes on even unarmed villagers and his escape routes are cut off?

This is different from Boko Haram with, its structures; or the organized bands of robbers who are coordinated well enough to keep going through short bursts of surprise attacks on vulnerable targets. The war of which Ango Abdullahi speaks will not, and does not lead to development. It is a war of attrition, borne of atavistic attachment to outdated paradigms and driven by a nihilistic worldview. That is not the calling of a professor of any hue, except of course the person is a professor of decay, underdevelopment and death. Look at Sokoto, Katsina, Zamfara, Borno, and most other northern states and tell us how these places would be in 10 years’ time. Zamfara State has the lowest education enrolment, the lowest school retention rates, the lowest positive education outcomes, one of the highest school drop-out rates, the lowest number of training schools for drivers, one of the highest records for untrained drivers and one of the highest number of deaths from road accidents. Look at the facts about a region with high poverty rate, like Sokoto State’s 89%, among others and tell me why Prof Ango Abdullahi should overlook this dreadful cocktail of misfortunes to brag about inter-tribal wars.

The tenor of Prof. Abdullahi’s contributions to national discourse in the last 10 years has been anything but edifying. It is, in fairness to him, sometimes an understandable reaction to other tendentious developments in the polity. But his voice need not be ever so shrill, or even banal as to lose the dignity some of us believe befits his person. A man of his presumed profile, stature and age need not come across as a posturing plebian, who is unrepentantly tendentiousness; to the point of not being taken too seriously. For a long time now, even some more temperate elders from his part of town and also some of his fellow university teachers, present and retired, have had to look at his visibility and performance in the public political space with grave misgivings; submitting that it often left a rather embarrassing taste in the mouth. That is not because he speaks for a section of the country, as leader or member of one of its public political pressure group, no. He has the right, and perhaps even the duty sometimes, to do so. But he must bring a certain dignity, general ambience and objectivity to bear.

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Many in the Ahmadu Bello University, particularly from the South, remember Ango Abdullahi’s tenure as Vice Chancellor. The ratio of 10% of admissions for the entire South and 90% for the North was rigorously enforced under him. “Go to the University of JAMB” was sometimes the refrain during registration, for successful candidates with letters of admission from JAMB, but whose names did not appear in the ABU admissions list. The School of Basic Studies (SBS), set up to quicken direct entry admissions through the Interim Joint Admissions Matriculations Board (IJMB), was handy. So were Certificate programmes in disciplines like Law, Islamic Law, Library Science, etc. for candidates with barely tolerable O’Level papers. The certificate course qualified them for admission into Diploma programmes, while the Diploma led to degree programmes. The question for Ango Abdullahi today is: “Are we developing the North,” assuming there is still a “North.”
As a related aside, the leaders of OPC, MASSOB, IPOB, EGBESU are now too rich to take any risks. Political statements, press releases and polite protest walks are going on, while their people are being wiped out. An unravelling is afoot. Many will vomit much. But it will be their last, painful vomit of shame.

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